Christmas in July
Twig of a holly branch
barbed leaves, dried,
gloat green, berries
by Katherine Gotthardt Through your ageless eyes, I understand your replies to what you most fear: trembling from the tip of the fuse to the cannon’s opening, the rip in the air of civil war, tear in the veil that lies: ‘there is but one truth.’ You can never know for sure where the dying
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5 a.m. on a Sunday and I accidentally wake my husband. “Poetry piled up overnight,” I explain. He murmurs, “Death by poetry,” and rolls over. But I am here thinking how Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and great poets I don’t know enough about have carried me through the night— this most recent night, one that
Nighttime cherry tree, impending windstorm. Pang of letting go. -Katherine Gotthardt Painting by Andrew Gotthardt
Bedside, I hold your plump hand, cold, white thread of foam sewing your lips shut, as if you disapprove of crying. It would be horrible if not for the knowing you’d transformed, universe having finished contracting, your soul sucked backed to the source, reverse birth, energy united, ready for reincarnation. How I’ll remember that exact
for my mother-in-law on the morning of her passing These leaves, white with winter, and those frozen, spiky cones, then, a cement barrier, marked “no trespassing,” protecting a broken dam– seagulls pay no mind to signs. On the side of the rough road, two frozen dandelions, still yellow, look ridiculously optimistic, as a horn beeps
By Katherine Gotthardt Often now, I think about death, usually at 3 a.m. when I wake to the thin skin of all that separates us. They say that’s when the dead speak, spirits and the living reside in one world, and anyone you miss is a but a pinpoint’s distance to your fingertips.
That afternoon we lost our way on the Appalachian Trail:
November, and an inexplicable wind picked up,
Of all pandemics I’ve survived, you are my favorite, teaching me what it means to be alive. Okay, I admit it, you’re the only one I’ve lived through, keeping me in my basement, (thankfully not alone), typing through Poetry Month, working from home, ordering groceries online – how much more privileged could I possibly be?
Because I could not stop for death, he kindly passed me by – he, dark winged and disappointed. Me, content with my busy pen – writing away mortality.